roller-coaster bookshelf

I’m trying to organize today’s pile of information, and I seem to be experiencing a little social media crisis. I have a pile of bookmarks I have dragged to my desktop — lots of great “things I want to read — when I get the chance.” It seems to start like this: I start (but by no means finish) reading a cool article such as this — Social Networking for Books: One Ring, or Loosely Joined? I’m intrigued by the chart — so of course I go to it on http://www.compete.com/ before I get to the end of the article (cool — cross-the-web analytics!); then of course I go to http://www.goodreads.com/, http://www.librarything.com/, and http://twitter.com/timoreilly/. Somehow or another, though I can’t for the life of me recount how, I also wind up on Nova Spivack’s blog and another blog I don’t even remember that referenced his blog, and I have a haphazard pile of links — AND of course I haven’t even read the first post fully yet — AND the irony is that some of these are about my library of actual physical books — MOST of which, I have not fully read.

I think: I’ll store these — so that I can get to them all later. I start bookmarking some of them in my Google Bookmarks account. I then realize some of these are ongoing chronicles and they instead belong in a reader I’d check regularly — so they should go into Google Reader. Then I run out of time altogether, and I’m back to square one until I get yet another post that’s interesting enough not to finish.

(stomp, stomp, stomp) I go with my big boots to my colleague, Rebecca, who is social-media-savvy. “What’s the difference between a bookmark and a feed anyway?” I mean — I know they’re different, but suddenly I insist that this is my current crisis.

She patiently explains that she mostly uses her feed reader now — and spends a couple of hours every morning digging through her reads and keeping up to date. I stalk away, secretly ashamed. I haven’t managed to keep up to date – either on my feed reader or my bookmarks.

Maybe I just need to realize that “when I get the chance” is never going to happen unless it happens now. Maybe it’s just about letting go — instead of collecting. Or maybe it’s about collecting and NOT letting go but getting better.

Or maybe therein again lies the Twitter rub: thanks to its “minimalism” (thanks again @timoreilly), it’s possible to keep up with the firehose — or is it really just skimming the surface?

For you? Is there a difference? How do YOU cope?